Art Week Tokyo’s ten-artist video programme challenges travel maps

By Daniel Okafor

Ten artists appear in Your Travel Guide To…, this year’s Art Week Tokyo selection of single-channel (one video feed) moving-image works, with five from Japan and one from the Japanese diaspora.

What does Art Week Tokyo ask?

Generations of tourists have carried dog-eared guidebooks across the world, using them to find must-see landmarks, local customs and places to eat, drink and sleep.

X Zhu-Nowell is the programme’s sector curator and executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum.

She said: “My interest in travel guides is less in them as a genre or style of literature, and more as a form that choreographs bodies within inhabited spaces, idealised landscapes, and any other kind of locale that has been deemed necessary to map out.”

Zhu-Nowell also said the showcase treats geography as shaped by migration, memory, labour and ideas.

According to Zhu-Nowell, the programme challenges the guidebook promise to supply must-see landmarks, local customs and every place to eat, drink and sleep for visitors. The works ask what gets mapped and what stays out of view.

How does a guide become a gatekeeper?

Kandis Williams’s A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025) draws on Victor Hugo Green’s The Green Book, a guide for Black Americans during Jim Crow, and reflects on mobility and power.

Zhu-Nowell said: “It identified restaurants, hotels, gas stations, soda shops and other businesses where Black travellers could expect to be served and were at less risk of harassment or price gouging.”

Williams frames the work around “the political reality that mobility equals power,” Zhu-Nowell said. Williams, a Black American artist, moves through Korea in the film, connecting the countries’ shared “musical aesthetics, histories of suppressed mourning, and experiences of militarisation and state violence,” she added.

What does technology do to the journey?

New York-based Ken Okiishi’s Brian at Home (2020-25) records Zoom calls with his personal trainer in Denizen, a New York City “smart-home hellscape” with app-based appliances and perks.

Zhu-Nowell called the video “addictive” and noted the home’s “seemingly endless array of app-based appliances and perks.” Okiishi walks the viewer through the “highly designed public/private space [to] watch its promise of frictionless inclusivity start to come apart,” she said.

Where are the artists based?

Zhu-Nowell has previously worked with four of the ten featured artists, including Berlin-based Kandis Williams, who had never shown in Japan before this programme.

“It’s important and meaningful to bring their work in this context alongside new companions,” Zhu-Nowell said.

The named participants’ bases are:

• Berlin and Beijing: He Xiangyu.
• Japan: Linda Iha, Fuyuhiko Takata and Atsushi Yamamoto, as well as the late Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024) and Hiroyuki Oki (1964-2025).
• Berlin: Kandis Williams.
• New York: Ken Okiishi.

Zhu-Nowell described the late Tanaami and Oki as “masters of handcrafted moving images.”

Why are travel guides never neutral?

Zhu-Nowell links eighteenth-century European guidance, late-twentieth-century pocket guides and today’s digitised travel forms, showing that the framing power of guidance travels with the format itself.

She said the combined perspectives reveal how “travel guides are far from neutral forms, and often do a poor job of concealing that lack of neutrality”. That is Zhu-Nowell’s blunt verdict: apparent neutrality does not remove politics; it conceals them.

In her wider historical account, guides mediate difference as well as place: “Each form they take reflects the long and complex history these objects have as difference-mediating technologies and storytelling devices.”

Her counter-example is the “infamous 18th-century ars apodemica guides” (manuals of conduct), which instructed wealthy European young men on a ‘world tour’ how to “observe, behave, and even listen to ‘others’” in foreign cultures. Zhu-Nowell called them the entitled inverse of The Green Book.

“Those pocket travel guides that proliferated at the end of the 20th century are also fairly famous,” Zhu-Nowell said. “Today, new forms, digitised and even more pocketable, have emerged from a self-described ‘nomadic’ class of travel-influencer globalists.”

She tied their framing power to philosopher Katherine McKittrick’s point that geography is never a neutral space.

Where can visitors see the programme?

The AWT Video programme runs at SMBC East Tower, 1F Earth Garden, 1-3-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, from 4 to 8 November, daily between 10am and 6pm.

Zhu-Nowell’s argument leaves a practical after-effect: every route plan can now be read as a claim about whose movement counts.